12 oktober 2013

Last week, I won this
Lambert typewriter at an online auction. The grandfather of the seller bought
it at least 50 years ago at a flea market in Amsterdam and it had been in the
family ever since. The machine is still in good condition, complete and (if I would
re-ink the pad) still working. See the video I made, below.

Inventor Frank Lambert
(born in France, emigrated to the USA) filed his first typewriter patent in
1884, but it was only in 1900 when the Lambert typewriter was produced for the
first time. In the mean time, he made a fortune with the invention of a water meter. The
sale of his typewriter proved to be more challenging, although over the next 3 decades more than 17.000 Lamberts
were sold.

The main reason why
people would prefer a Lambert over, for example, an Underwood 5 (the most
common standard typewriter at the time), was because the Lambert was four times
as cheap. You could own a Lambert for as little as 25 dollar. It was not as
good or fast as an Underwood, but for sporadically use at home it was good
enough.

Most of the Lambert
typewriters (from serial number 2.500 onwards) were sold by Sidney Hébert from France.
First he only dealt the typewriters, later (from SN 5.500 onwards) he bought the machinery and
constructed Lambert typewriters himself. These later machines bear the label "constructeur".

My Lambert typewriter bears the name of
Sidney Hébert, but without the label “constructeur”. Strange enough, its serial number is very high: 26.618. The Typewriter Sketchbook mentions that normal serial
numbering stopped around 17.000. Only a few machines within the 26.000 range have
survived and it is suggested that these machines were numbered differently for
export.

My machine has some
export characters on the keyboard (the so-called “multiple key”), so that would
subscribe this theory, as well as the fact that it eventually turned up at a
flea market in the Netherlands. More important, its multiple key can rotate in order to write italics.
According to the same Typewriter Sketchbook, only the first 3.300 Lamberts
carried this feature, which is why collectors call these machines “model
1”.

Unless somebody comes
up with a better conclusion, all this makes me believe that my Lambert typewriter model 1 should have had a
serial number between 2.500 and 3.300, but was numbered differently because it
was meant for export.